Episode #4: Dad Died, Now The Work Starts

 

Narrator:
In a world captivated by criticism and negative clickbait headlines, it’s easy to overlook the scope and power of technologies propelling us forward. At Tech Optimist, we delve into the vibrant intersection of technology and entrepreneurship, shining a light on innovators who are building a better future.

As members of the most active venture capital firm in the United States, our unique vantage point offers us insights into the real-world impact of technology. Join us as we explore, celebrate, and contribute to the stories of those creating tomorrow.

Mike Collins:
Welcome to the fourth episode of the Tech Optimist podcast. We have two portfolio company interviews for you today. One is working in the area of home medical testing. The other is trying to help families working through the settling of an estate.

Enjoy the show. We have three blocks for you today. In block one, we meet our portfolio company, SiPhox. They’re innovating in the area of home medical testing, something we’re going to see a lot more of as we move into a more customized, remote, AI-driven healthcare system.

In block two, I talk to the founder of Alix, a company working in the area of estate execution. If any of you, like I have, have had to work through the settling of an estate, you know how time-consuming, disorganized, and expensive it is. It’s an area where innovation can really help, and Alix is trying to do it.

Finally, in block three, we end the show with a segment where I chat with a young VC in the business, and we talk about things going on in their career and in the industry. Today, we’re talking a little bit about AI.

As a reminder, the Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized financial advice, and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

Okay, let’s get into block one. Here’s the company, SiPhox.

Michael, it’s nice to meet you. SiPhox is an AV portfolio company. Why don’t you just introduce yourself and introduce your company and what you guys do?

Michael Dubrosvky:
Sure. My background’s originally in chemistry, materials, biology—kind of that nexus—but for the past, I want to say, six or seven years now, I’ve been working in what’s called silicon photonics.

Silicon photonics is using semiconductor technology, but instead of controlling electrons, you’re controlling photons—so, working with light. This call we’re having actually is going through multiple photonic chips because there are fibers connecting data centers. Eventually, you have to convert the light into electricity because computers use electrons.

All of those conversions are being done on photonic chips, and that’s really what’s enabled the connectivity we have today—the way that the internet’s been scaled. So, we use that technology to do blood testing.

The reason that makes sense is that if you go into a central lab like a Quest or a Labcorp, if you open up the tools that they’re using, they’re full of optics: lasers, lenses, detectors, and so on. What we’re doing is basically miniaturizing all the optics that go into one type of blood testing tool called an immunoassay analyzer.

We’re taking that tool and turning it into something that can be used in the home, and that’s the main thrust of the company. We’re already in the market with something that’s a little bit less innovative. It’s a mail-in test where you put your blood on a small card that separates the cells from the serum. That card is preserved in a desiccant bag and shipped to a central lab, where we provide 17 different biomarkers from that one card.

We were able to put something on the market that’s very dominant in terms of cost versus performance. You have to get six test kits from our competitor in order to equal one. You have to stab your finger six times to get the same results. So that’s been really interesting—we’ve been doing that for about the last year and a half, and it’s grown a lot. We have thousands and thousands of people using it every month.

We’ve already saved—well, we know of at least two lives that we’ve more or less saved with things that we’ve found. We don’t know the full medical history of what’s happening to people after they take the test, but we have at least two that have been documented in Trustpilot reviews.

It’s been really interesting, and the goal of the company is really to put a device in every home.

Mike Collins:
This is more of just an interim step. You generate some revenue, you debug the technology. Walk me through the strategy of how you came about this.

Michael Dubrosvky:
Yeah. The development cycles in medical devices are very long. If we weren’t in such a regulated space, we would’ve already launched to the home.

The technology—as you know—already a year and a half ago, we could do demos at conferences where we would prick a finger and give a result right away. Basically, these are the kinds of engineering units that we already had a year and a half ago.

Mike Collins:
He’s holding up—for the listeners—something about the size of a shoebox, maybe a little smaller.

Michael Dubrosvky:
No, even smaller. This is my phone here. Basically, it’s a little larger.

Mike Collins:
It’s like a phone box, yeah.

Michael Dubrosvky:
Yeah. It’s a little bit larger than a phone, but basically already very low cost—a couple hundred dollars range, even in low volume. The problem is that when you make a medical device, they often get stuck the way they are. You want that first version, as opposed to pretty much every other product where you just launch and see how the customers like it.

With a medical device, you don’t get to iterate that much. The first version has to be very strong. So we decided not to compromise and to focus on developing the market with something that could be launched quickly. The reason mail-in testing can be launched quickly is that it’s regulated in a completely different way.

It’s regulated by—this is maybe boring—but it’s regulated by something called CLIA. You have a lab director in the lab, and it’s like the lab director acts as a miniature FDA. It’s totally different, and there are lots of—

Mike Collins:
Super smart way to go. You’ve seen almost the opposite example with some of the—I won’t name the company—but they launched a wearable.

It’s not really ready for prime time, but it takes a lot of money. Then all of a sudden, you get bad reviews. Yeah, everything in software sucks when you first launch it too. It’s just that you get to iterate—

Michael Dubrosvky:
Very quickly.

Mike Collins:
… very quickly. It seems like this is a really clever way to stay on the innovation, rapid iteration cycle.

Provide value to people while you continue to refine hardware and software. So really smart. I commend you for that.

Michael Dubrosvky:
I was just digging around—this is the V1. We’re now deep into building basically V2, but this is what the V1 looked like. You have a chip here that’s got 15 different sensors on it that do immunoassays. You can do, in theory, up to 15 proteins and hormones, and then there’s some fluidics and so on. This plugs into the reader like this.

We could have commercialized this, but basically, we decided to go to mail-in testing. It’s been working very well. It’s a strategy that hasn’t really been used yet. The opposite happened to one company. There’s a company called Cue Health that launched to the home with a COVID test. I think they spent half a billion dollars scaling up manufacturing and so on.

Then they ended up launching mail-in testing afterwards because the difficulty of adding more things to that box that they launched to the home was very high, and they needed to have more products. So they launched mail-in testing afterwards. Obviously, at that point, it’s very hard to innovate when you’re so large and so on.

So that’s been our strategy. We’ll see how it works out. It’s pretty unconventional in the medical device space, so we’ll see how it goes.

Mike Collins:
No, I think it’s smart though. It’s worth a shot. Where are you in just the fundraising side of this story and the scale of your business right now with people and the amount of money you’ve raised?

Michael Dubrosvky:
Yeah, I didn’t mention this at the beginning. It’s probably an important detail. I’m co-founder of the company and chief product officer. I’m not the CEO. Actually, early on I was much more involved in fundraising. Now, just because of how much is going on, I’m trying to stay out of it a little bit because now we have a product in the market.

That’s taking up a lot of the bandwidth I had that would go into helping with fundraising. But my co-founder, Diedrik, is leading that—he’s the CEO. We went through Y Combinator in 2020, which was extremely helpful. I would recommend it to anybody, pretty much.

Even though we were probably the first chip company—there was maybe one other one or something—they really did not have experience with semiconductor companies. But that didn’t really matter; they were still extremely helpful.

We did Y Combinator and then we raised… the story of it was that we raised some money, like a couple million, and then that triggered Khosla to come in. Khosla ended up leading the round, and we got to about $6 million that way in our seed round.

That got us through to having really baked engineering units, like what I showed and so on. Then we raised—it ended up adding to about $30 million with Intel, Khosla, and then they followed on again and so on. Actually, your fund as well, Alumni Ventures. So we raised about a total of $30 million.

Mike Collins:
That was 2023?

Michael Dubrosvky:
Yeah. The $20 million of that was closed in 2023.

Mike Collins:
Right.

Michael Dubrosvky:
Or 2019, I think.

Mike Collins:
Excellent. Give us just more context—what do you view as big trends and tailwinds to the work you guys are doing?

Michael Dubrosvky:
I think if you want to be successful in a hype cycle, you really want to be working five years in advance of the hype cycle. For example, if you want to be doing AI, it would’ve been ideal to be doing it five years ago. I think, in some ways, we’re in that kind of position.

Michael Dubrosvky:
I think this home healthcare thing had a moment during COVID, but that was like a proof of concept. Telemedicine grew, I think, fortyfold during COVID, so it broke a lot of assumptions about what was possible or not. One of the reasons is there’s just not good technology, including home blood testing.

You need blood testing for 70% of medical decisions, or some type of diagnostic, and usually, blood testing is involved. It’s very difficult to actually do telemedicine effectively without having the person come in.

Mike Collins:
No, it’s like you go in for the blood work, then you do it. It’s incredibly inefficient compared to if we all had one of these units. We could even get the instructions downloaded, do the testing, and it could eliminate, I don’t know, 50% of trips to your physician, or even if you just go to an independent lab.

Michael Dubrosvky:
Absolutely. I think a lot of us had this epiphany if you didn’t deal with the system much before COVID. During COVID, it was really clear very early on that, “Oh, man.” Our thinking was that within 10 years, this type of device will be in many homes, if not all. We’re halfway through that now. The company’s been around about four and a half years. I think the trend is there. Six out of ten Americans have a chronic disease.

There’s no way to turn back the clock to some kind of state where people are very healthy. Maybe you look at Europe—there are some countries which are very walkable, and the food is really high quality. That is not easy to replicate here. But we do know that if you do frequent blood testing and a bunch of other things—many of which are not expensive—they can probably be solved with software.

I think AI is actually going to make that a lot easier. If you look at what makes up the highest quality medicine you can buy, a lot of it is information—checking on the person, improving, tuning what they’re doing. But the thing you can’t replace with software is actually collecting real data on the human being. Even the physical exams—you have to get blood test results, and in some cases, scans and so on.

I think that’s going to work really well with the trend of automating information processing while bringing to the home the cumbersome process of collecting blood data. That trend is underway. Everything in healthcare is slow, but at some point, just because 20% of GDP is being spent on healthcare, we have to change.

It’s hard to tell—is it because people are sick, or are people sick because it’s so broken? I don’t know where the root cause is, but I think that’s something we can make a dent in. The trend has to be toward fixing this. We can’t go from spending 20% of GDP to 80% of GDP. It has to be reversed. Hopefully, we can make an impact on that and also capture some of that value.

Mike Collins:
Yeah. I think we’re also, over the next 10 years, going to see people taking more responsibility for their own healthcare. Right now, the system is largely, “Wait until you get sick or broken, and then we’ll fix you.”

I do think there’s a longer-term trend toward preventive care. If you can manage your numbers, manage your weight, and stay on top of these tests, you can prevent far more expensive, reactive forms of healthcare. Even with GLP-1 drugs—many people are improving their outcomes, losing weight, getting healthier—but they all want numbers.

How is this affecting my cholesterol? My apoB? Other markers? If I could get those numbers reasonably and more frequently, it would just be more information to help someone stay healthier longer—which is a huge ROI.

Michael Dubrosvky:
Yeah. One of the things we’re doing is launching health programs on top of the blood testing we already offer. We teamed up with a couple of people, including one MD-PhD who was actually a customer of ours. He used SiPhox for a year to track his own blood results.

We recently launched a heart health program in beta, and now we have 50 to 100 people in it. The idea is that drugs have their place—statins, ezetimibe (another lipid medication), and maybe GLP-1s as well, although we’re not involved in that yet. But a lot of people don’t want to stay on drugs their whole life if they don’t have to.

Drugs can help you get to a point. This is measurable. For example, if you’re taking statins, you want the minimum effective dose to get you to a healthy lipid level. Lipids can also be too low, so you really want to tune it. You want to avoid side effects, so you take the lowest minimum—

Mike Collins:
They know it’s a poison. It goes back 500 years.

Michael Dubrosvky:
Right. Right now, the way dosage is done is on a population level. It’s like, “On average, we’ll throw this at you and see what happens in a year.” But if it’s low-cost to do it in a precision way, that’s obviously better. Somebody paying $100K to $200K for precision or concierge medicine isn’t doing that. The real question is, can we scale this to many people?

It’s two parts: automating a lot of the manual effort that physicians currently have to do so they can scale up, and getting measurements more frequently so you can adjust dosage at low cost.

I think the idea of getting people on a drug that can help them—like a GLP-1 or a statin—and then actually helping them get off of it is big.

Mike Collins:
It’s like something you put on a baby—the very smallest dose—

Michael Dubrosvky:
Yes, exactly.

Mike Collins:
… meets them where they are.

Michael Dubrosvky:
That’s probably the future of a lot of these types of interventions. Otherwise, they make less and less sense if you stretch them out. Is it okay to take a GLP-1 for 30 years? We don’t even know. So that’s our thinking.

That’s still early, but we think there’s a lot of promise in combining frequent testing with this type of taper and optimization of medicine.

Mike Collins:
Great. Any asks for our audience, Michael? How can they help?

Michael Dubrosvky:
If you’re interested in optimizing your longevity—specifically focused on heart health, lipids, and metabolic markers like fasting insulin—you can try joining the beta program we’re doing for heart health. 

Michael Dubrosvky:
Today, if you join, Phil—who’s the MD-PhD working on this—will look at your data for about an hour when you take a test. There’s no doctor-patient relationship, but you’ll still get that level of review.

Mike Collins:
It gets people looking at it, yeah.

Michael Dubrosvky:
Yes, exactly. I think that’s a cool thing you can do if you’re curious about it.

Or if you’ve never measured your apoB and want to get it checked to see where you’re at, that’s a great way to try SiPhox and also help us.

Mike Collins:
Can you do that on your website? If people go there, is there a sign-up for your beta?

Michael Dubrosvky:
Yeah, it’s partially hidden because when we send people to the site, we try—

Mike Collins:
We’ll get it in the show notes.

Michael Dubrosvky:
Yeah. I’ll provide the link, but basically, in the menu bar, there’s a section called “Blueprints,” then “Heart Health.” That’s one way.

And just one thing—the company is very careful about hiring, which is a big pillar of what we’re doing. Because it’s so interdisciplinary, you need amazing people across a lot of different areas.

I think referring great people to us—engineers who want to work on a transformational product like this, or business and product people who are passionate about doing something new in healthcare—is incredibly valuable. There aren’t many people like that who are truly nerdy about it. It’s not just a good business opportunity to them—they’re genuinely interested on a personal level.

We always try to find people like that for the product and business teams. Referring those kinds of people to SiPhox so they can check it out, try it, see if they’re interested, and maybe come work for us—that’s the most valuable thing, given the audience for this podcast.

Mike Collins:
Yeah, appreciate that. Final question—what’s your favorite personal productivity hack?

Michael Dubrosvky:
I used to do Chinese manufacturing, building factories in China and one in America. When I first started, it was at the acquirer—that’s what I was doing.

I found that if you book a flight to China two weeks in advance, the next two weeks become extremely productive. The hack is cutoff—you create an artificial, imposing deadline where you literally have to leave, and everything moves faster. That’s the only real hack I have. I’m not very efficient on a day-to-day basis, but doing that forces everything to happen.

Mike Collins:
Deadlines work. Deadlines absolutely work. We’re human beings—this is the software we run our lives with, between our ears.

If you can mentally create a deadline, it’s a good hack. I was talking to someone who is literally moving just so they can clean out their junk.

Michael Dubrosvky:
Yes, exactly.

Mike Collins:
That’s another kind of forced constraint. Humans rise to the occasion time and time again when we put constraints on each other or ourselves.

Michael, it was really great to meet and talk with you. Keep up the good work—it’s a super exciting company. Thanks again for letting us be involved.

To our audience: help them out—buy their products, send good people their way.

Michael Dubrosvky:
Yeah, thank you very much, Mike.

Mike Collins:
Have a good one. See you.

Mike Collins:
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Here’s segment two in our conversation with Alix. This entrepreneur’s company is tackling estate execution. Let’s learn more.

Mike Collins:
All right. Tech Optimist podcast—we’re talking to one of our portfolio companies today. Alexandra, why don’t you introduce yourself and your company?

Alexandra Mysoor:
Yeah, hey, thanks for having me. I’m Alexandra Mysoor, co-founder and CEO of a company called Alix.

Mike Collins:
What’s the business do? What’s your elevator pitch, Alexandra?

Alexandra Mysoor:
At Alix, we’re the first and only automated wealth transfer solution. We’ve created a platform to simplify the estate settlement process.

Mike Collins:
Let’s talk about that pain point. Estate planning is something people should do, but they often don’t.

Mike Collins:
Demographically, I assume we’re looking at a huge wave of boomers now entering that part of their journey. Yeah, you’re trying to make it simpler and cheaper, I assume.

Alexandra Mysoor:
Yeah. Only one-third of all people who could do estate settlement in this country do it. When I landed on this space, which I’ll tell you about in a moment, I felt like I wanted to get everyone to do estate planning. But the reality is that number really isn’t going to change because people have a hard time planning in this country, making difficult decisions.

I wanted to help families when the moment came, when someone you love passes away. We decided to focus on estate settlement, and unfortunately, it was through a personal experience. A very dear family friend of ours passed away, and being very good friends with her children, I just offered to help. I’m not an attorney and had never had to settle an estate.

To be quite candid, the family friend was a stay-at-home mother. Her husband had served our country and was an elevator technician. Simple, good people, who had lived in the same house since the ’80s. My family friend had a paper map that took us on this digital scavenger hunt, which was really interesting.

The process of settling Carol’s estate took me 900 hours and 18 months, which is the average amount of time it takes families in this country to settle an estate. That’s a full-time job no American’s ever been trained for. You don’t know what you have ahead of you. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things you don’t know until you’re in it.

Mike Collins:
Yeah. This is more on the estate settlement—

Alexandra Mysoor:
Settlement, that’s right.

Mike Collins:
… versus the estate planning side. They’re in it, they have the need, and it’s either 900 hours and a year. How is your tool going to help that? Again, you’re pretty early stage. What stage are you in your journey here?

Alexandra Mysoor:
Yeah, we raised our seed financing about a year ago now. Initialized was our lead and, of course, American Family, Alumni Ventures, and the D Green Team—which I know is where you started—is on our cap table as well.

Look, we’re in a really good place where we have paying customers and have settled estates. We’re busy cranking through our distribution channels now. We’ve done some automations, which is really tremendous.

Just going back to estate settlement for a second, because I think this is one of those spaces people don’t actually understand. You don’t really think about it until, unfortunately, you have to deal with it. One of the first and most important things is figuring out what’s in the estate.

Most people know the net worth of Elon Musk and Bill Gates more than they know their own parents’. That was a surprising finding for us.

At Alix, we help anyone with a trust, a will, or nothing. And by the way, folks who have nothing has nothing to do with any specific demographic situation—it is actually the majority of America. In fact, folks who might have a trust or a will will often find that it is outdated.

Again, it’s just a paper map. It doesn’t do the heavy lift, doesn’t wait on the phone with the banks for you, doesn’t return your Comcast cable box, doesn’t notify all the credit bureaus—it doesn’t do the administrative work.

When I was doing the work for Carol, I did what a lot of people would do, which is call an attorney and pay them about 30K. You’re not really quite sure why. Two months go by, and I call the attorney:

I said, “What are you doing?”

He replied, “Well, what do you want me to do?”

I said, “I don’t know—wait on the phone with Bank of America and let’s get Carol’s bank account.”

He said, “You want me to wait on the phone for five hours and charge the family $650 an hour?”

That was a huge insight—that right now, the unit economics don’t work for these point solutions and advisors to be able to do the administrative work.

At Alix, we’re automating all the administrative part of it. But here’s the thing: it’s the most human moment anyone’s going to ever go through in their life. It’s not insignificant. For us, we use a “mind and machine” philosophy where you will always have a human-in-the-loop. We’re powering up the human—making them like a superhero—by automating and using AI.

Mike Collins:
Yeah, so high-tech, high-touch. Today, what’s the mix and what do you eventually see that mix being, as far as the human helping people personally through this tough time versus the automations, the AI, the tools, the software that can just administratively make it much lower friction? Where are you today and where do you want to get to?

Alexandra Mysoor:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Let me answer it by saying when I first started with my co-founder, Hugh Tamassia, we had this great idea: “I want there to be a magical button you press and poof, the estates transfer.”

But what we found really early on when we actually started serving families—and I say families, not customers, because we do end up serving the entire family—is that they want a human-in-the-loop.

Now this is really important—not through the entire 12 to 18-month journey, but at that first point of contact. They need to know someone is on their side.

While we’ve been settling estates, we’ve built a care team with highly trained, empathetic folks that includes a CPA, trust administrators, lawyers, etc. Now that we’ve been settling estates for a while, we’ve been automating the tasks that take the longest.

If you think about chapter one in estate settlement—discovery—most people don’t know what they don’t know. I say this tongue in cheek, but how can we transfer what we don’t know exists?

That’s really important. For almost every single family we’ve served—in fact, I think every single one—we have found something. We’re giving families peace of mind and certainty in a time where they don’t have it.

We’ve automated that discovery into all the different interwebs, which has been incredible.

The second part is all the form filling. You’d be surprised at the amount of financial and government paperwork. People have checking, savings, retirement accounts—you name it—and they all ask for the same information but in a different way. If you spell one thing wrong—name, address, something—it will set you back months in the estate settlement process.

The ability to have the machine ensure that what we’re doing is efficient and correct is huge.

I also want to talk about distribution for executors and heirs. People don’t realize that when someone names them executor, that’s a fiduciary and legal responsibility. They don’t realize what a huge responsibility that actually is.

Alexandra Mysoor:
When these distributions start to come in, there are all these questions. By the way, this is not an insignificant amount of money to get. There’s not a party hat moment, Mike, where on this date, everything dad or mom left for you arrives. They arrive in different places, the distribution. You’ll be surprised to know that one—this shocked me—one out of three people who receive an inheritance in this country has a negative balance in just two years.

That’s where I think there’s this interesting opportunity to think about this gap in the value chain. We talk about this great wealth transfer, $84 trillion about to exchange hands from the boomer and silent generation to Gen X and millennials.

Mike Collins:
It’s mind-boggling how big that is.

Alexandra Mysoor:
Right.

Mike Collins:
I don’t think people talk enough about it, but it’s something that I think people have a hard time. The boomers, of which I’m right at the edge, have done an enormously good job at accumulating wealth. But when they pass on, that’s moving on to the next generation, for sure. It’s an enormous amount of wealth.

Alexandra Mysoor:
Here’s the thing, Mike. When people talk about this great wealth transfer, you hear wealth planners talking about this windfall you’ll get—but how are you going to get it?

Mike Collins:
Right.

Alexandra Mysoor:
People don’t talk about that. We’re really the only solution that helps make that process streamlined and holistic. If you ask an attorney, a CPA, your neighbor, “How do you settle an estate?” you’re going to get a variety of answers. But at Alix, we widen the aperture. It’s for all the things that come after you lose someone that you love, and that’s really important.

We don’t just do a sliver of the work; we do all the work. When I started this, everyone would… First of all, it’s important to know, we all agree now you don’t need a CPA to do your taxes—TurboTax exists. You have an option to see a professional when needed. I look at estate settlement in the same way. You could view us as the TurboTax of estate settlement.

Mike Collins:
Yeah, no. So the next big milestone is raising your A round. What are the three things that you think Alix needs to accomplish before you’re ready to go out and raise that first institutional round?

Alexandra Mysoor:
Yeah, I think we’ve had some really good headwinds. We’ve had some really good luck. We have a really good team. We’ve seen some really great signals. I think we’re continuing to focus on creating a great experience for our customers.

We already get really heartfelt messages from our customers where we’ve been able to settle their estates thus far. We’re busy working on some more automations and just helping as many families as we can. To be honest, it’s more of everything we’re already doing.

Mike Collins:
Yeah. Our community is large and helpful. What’s your ask?

Alexandra Mysoor:
Here’s the thing, truth be told, you don’t know that you’re going to need this until the moment comes. You really don’t. When you’re in that moment, it’s a heightened state of emotion, and so oftentimes, we do turn to our family and our friends.

If you have a friend or a family member or are personally going through this, please refer them to Alix. It’s incredible how much people wish they had more time to just be with their family and grieve, but all these administrative things are such a headache and are so burdensome to the entire family.

Mike Collins:
All right, so last question. How about a personal productivity hack? What one thing do you do that you just have found really works for you?

Alexandra Mysoor:
I think I have to say being a parent has taught me a lot about being ruthlessly focused and prioritizing, which is an extremely great gift and it’s a productivity hack.

The other one that goes along with that is time blocking. I think there’s something to be said about these 90-minute chunks—this is what you’re focusing on. You can do the same thing with meetings.

I like to do outward-facing meetings in a chunk of time, inward-facing meetings in another chunk of time. I think it helps reduce context switching, which can be really helpful.

Mike Collins:
Now, I have observed mom CEOs being very efficient and sensitive on blocks of time, getting things done. Having to be super productive because you just don’t have a lot of ability to waste time. So something we can all learn from, for sure.

Alexandra Mysoor:
Yeah.

Mike Collins:
Go ahead.

Alexandra Mysoor:
It’s also interesting that there’s this show called Lessons in Chemistry. I don’t know if anybody in the audience has watched it, but there’s this scene where the main character is a new mother and she goes to her neighbor’s house exhausted. She hasn’t slept, her newborn’s just a few weeks old.

Her maternal neighbor says, “This is what mothering is. You think you can’t, but you do it anyways. You think you can’t, you just find a way.” Honestly, that is the best lesson of being a startup founder or CEO—you think you can’t, but you find a way.

Mike Collins:
That’s the common denominator of successful CEOs: the ability to stick with it, grit, finding a way.

We wish you and Alix the best in your journey. Thanks for spending a few minutes with us today, Alexandra.

Alexandra Mysoor:
Thank you so much.

Mike Collins:
Nice to meet you. All right.

Alexandra Mysoor:
Thank you.

Mike Collins:
Be in touch.

Alexandra Mysoor:
Take care.

Mike Collins:
Bye-bye.

Laura Rippy:
Hey, everyone. Taking a quick break to share more about the Women’s Fund from Alumni Ventures. AV is one of the only VC firms focused on making venture capital accessible to individual accredited investors like you. In fact, AV is one of the most active and best-performing VCs in the US. We co-invest alongside renowned lead investors.

With the Alumni Ventures Women’s Fund, you’ll have the opportunity to help us invest in fiery female founders. PitchBook reports female-led startups are more capital efficient and exit faster, yet only receive 15% of all venture capital dollars. We see this as a great opportunity and we’re starting from a position of strength.

Alumni Ventures has already invested in over 350 startups founded, co-founded, or led by women. Join us in the Alumni Ventures Women’s Fund to put your investing capital behind a diversified portfolio of female-led, high-velocity startups as they change the world. Visit AV.VC/funds/womens to learn more. Now back to the show.

Mike Collins:
Here is segment three in my conversation with a young VC. This week, Naren and I talk about the future of AI.

Naren Ramaswamy:
Hello, Mike. Great to see you again this week. Love to pick your brain on what’s on your mind this week. Maybe we’ll start with—it’s always important to touch on AI and the developments that are happening.

But the last few weeks, we’ve touched on current events and news, but I’d love to take a bird’s-eye view of this AI revolution. There’s a lot of gloom in the press about AI taking away jobs and what that means for the future. What do you think it means for our kids and the jobs of the future?

Mike Collins:
Yeah. It’s definitely thought-provoking to think about. I think the conventional wisdom has been related to engineering, STEM. I think there’s always been this split in my world, between people who have thought about going to college and getting educated because it is a means to a job. One goes to college and develops knowledge and a skill to be—fill in the blank—an accountant, an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer.

I think that I grew up in that. I went to a liberal arts school, Dartmouth College, and I was an engineering science major while I was at this liberal arts school. I really have always believed in the power of liberal arts. But I grew up in an era where that’s what people would ask you: “Where are you going to school? Basically, what are you going to be?”

Your job defined you. I think that has been, in some circles, even stronger more recently. I think there’s a lot of, “College is a waste. You don’t learn anything that’s practical.” You get all this debt. The only jobs that matter are—it’s okay if you want to be a marine biologist, scientist, engineer—those are still okay. But going to Harvard and being a religion major is scoffed at.

I have always believed one goes to college for a bunch of reasons. There’s some adulting, there’s independence, there’s experimentation with who you want to be as a person. But I always felt the most important things to acquire are the ability to communicate and the ability to learn. Again, when I went to school, there was no internet, there were no smartphones.

Naren Ramaswamy:
Absolutely. That’s actually a good segue. You touched on venture and how that job will evolve. I’d love to bring us to the present and maybe a little bit of the recent past, and talk about recent vintage venture funds. A lot of them have been trying to raise capital in the current macro environment and have been falling short of their targets.

Mike Collins:
Yeah. It’s not surprising. Venture capital, like every asset class, has its cycles. We’re coming off a period of extremely low interest rates, really frothy valuations, and a flood of capital into venture. That was great for entrepreneurs raising money, but it’s resulted in a lot of funds that were raised at high valuations and are struggling to deliver returns that will justify the size of their next fund.

At the same time, LPs—limited partners—have their own dynamics. Their portfolios are often overallocated to private equity and venture right now, just because public markets went down and private valuations lagged. So they’re over their target allocations and are naturally pulling back. Combine that with a higher interest rate environment where safer assets suddenly have decent yields, and you have less urgency to take on venture risk.

This creates a challenging fundraising environment for many funds. You’ll see a lot of consolidation, some funds not making it to another vintage, and others raising smaller funds than before.

Naren Ramaswamy:
Do you think this will have a long-term effect on the venture landscape?

Mike Collins:
Yes and no. In the near term, fewer dollars mean fewer funds raised and smaller check sizes. Some managers won’t be able to raise follow-on funds, and there will likely be more disciplined pricing and investing. That’s probably healthy for the ecosystem.

Long-term, though, innovation isn’t slowing down. Technology is advancing at a breakneck pace—AI, biotech, climate tech, space, quantum computing. Great startups will continue to be built, and capital will follow them. Venture as an asset class has delivered strong returns over decades, through multiple cycles.

So while this is a tough period—maybe even a cleansing period—the industry will recover and evolve. New managers will emerge, different structures may become more common, but venture capital as a way to fund innovation isn’t going anywhere.

Naren Ramaswamy:
Makes sense. So for someone thinking about a career in venture capital today, especially younger professionals, what skills or mindset should they focus on given this environment and the changes you see coming?

Mike Collins:
Great question. I think it ties back to what we said earlier about flexibility and human skills. The technical side of venture—building models, evaluating markets—that’s important, but increasingly augmented by data and AI tools. What machines can’t replace is judgment built from experience, storytelling, building trusted relationships with entrepreneurs and LPs, and helping founders navigate the emotional journey of building a company.

For young people, I’d focus on developing those relationship skills. Learn how to spot talent, how to coach, how to communicate clearly and persuasively. Understand industries deeply, so you can develop conviction that others might miss.

And importantly, stay humble and adaptable. The venture playbook shifts—what worked in 2021 won’t work in 2025. The best VCs learn, evolve, and build strong networks that stand the test of time.

Naren Ramaswamy:
That’s really insightful. It feels like even as AI transforms so much of this industry, the human element—judgment, trust, empathy—becomes even more valuable.

Mike Collins:
Exactly. Technology changes the tools, but venture is ultimately about backing people. It’s a human-to-human business, and I don’t think that’s going to change.

Naren Ramaswamy:
In the last 12 years, the number of VC firms has tripled. This is an existential threat for VC or those VC firms because they may not have a differentiated access point for deals and that’s why they’re falling short. As the asset class deployed a lot of dollars in 2021 at peak valuations, many of those companies are now crammed down. That’s the only feedback you have if you go out to raise. I’m curious what you think about the future of VC and how secondaries potentially play into that?

Mike Collins:
Yeah. I think a couple of things to unpack there, Naren. One is I think firms that were formed in 2020 to 2023 are in trouble. If that’s their first vintage in those time periods, I think they’re facing a double whammy of probably deploying capital during an overpriced period of time. The LPs that backed them are probably overallocated into the asset class.

I think it’s going to be very difficult for those vintage, new funds. I think there’ll be a cleaning of the house like we’ve seen with some ventures. Only the best will survive it, and they will thrive. It’s a good time—it’s a buyer’s market for talent in the VC world, for sure.

I think the second point is the market for secondaries. Just to clarify that for some of our audience: this is when people come into a private company and buy stock from early investors or employees.

There’s been a bunch of trends going on for a while now related to fewer companies going public. Many companies don’t want to be public given the costs, the short-termism, and generally the pain of being a public company while trying to think long-term. It takes a lot of fortitude with all those pressures.

Then there’s been capital availability, so why go public? With the exception of providing liquidity, that’s about the only solid argument anymore. Capitalism loves opportunity, so I think we are on a long-term trend to make the marketplace more efficient for providing liquidity to both investors and employees—allowing companies to stay private longer.

Today, it’s not that efficient. It’s only a handful of companies that have access. Usually, it’s a pretty big discount that sellers have to pay. There have been large pools of capital accumulating over the past year or so to do this, but it’s not an efficient marketplace yet at all. I think we’re going to see that market become more and more efficient.

Again, I just think it’s good. It provides more options, aligns incentives, and I think great companies take a long time to build. Through history and tradition, venture capital funds are 10 years long, and sometimes the investment takes place in maybe year three or four of that fund. There’s a fuse that’s fairly artificial, putting pressure on management teams to have an exit.

Companies aren’t ready, the market isn’t very attractive. We’re also living in an environment where there’s increased regulatory scrutiny on mergers and acquisitions. If the market’s not there to go public and the M&A market is constricted, again, you’re stuck.

I think there’s going to be a lot of evolution and innovation in that space over the next five or 10 years. I think that’ll be good for the entrepreneurial economy, and we’ll see how it develops. Do you have any thoughts along those lines, Naren?

Naren Ramaswamy:
No, absolutely. I think I agree with you that we’re in what seems to be a little bit of a blip where the secondary markets haven’t really burgeoned into something big, and IPOs and M&As are blocked. But having secondaries play a bigger role and become another liquidity path—both for founders, which incentivizes them to start more companies, and for VC firms to continue backing founders—will be extremely important to the innovation economy in the US and around the world.

I think it’s because IPOs and M&As exist as a liquidity path that people are incentivized to start and invest in companies. Providing secondaries as another avenue will be critical for innovation.

I’m looking forward to it and I’m also bullish on it. We saw that Lexington Partners, for example, raised their largest-ever secondary fund of $28 billion, and several other secondary-focused VC funds have emerged to buy stakes from other VCs.

I think we’re still in the early innings of this, and it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.

Mike Collins:
One of the ways that plays out too is we just move away from what I call the “big bang exit.” It’s like you form the company, you work hard, and there’s a big event where everybody cashes out—the company gets sold or you go public. It’s viewed as this finish line.

I think it would be much healthier if, as companies reach some level of maturity, founders and early investors were able to take chips off the table in small, reasonable amounts along the way. Instead of just “nothing, nothing, nothing… huge outcome,” a founder could sell 5% of their stake maybe at a Series B and achieve some of that.

It’s almost like a release valve of that pressure, which I think would help the development of sustainable, long-term businesses and the solving of really hard technical problems that take a long time.

When I started in the business, the idea was you wanted the founder living out of the back of their car and eating ramen noodles for 10 years. That was a lousy perspective. The fact is, entrepreneurial teams and founders are motivated by things far beyond money. It’s actually counterproductive for them not to have resources or to have to live far from the office.

The ability to encourage a healthier ecosystem—including for founders—and for people considering leaving big companies to join startups (where it’s not a 10-year gamble), is better when there are reasonable waypoints along the way where everyone says, “Okay, this is progressing well, we’re taking some chips off the table,” with willing buyers at that price.

I think there’s a little of that now, but there’s room for a lot more. As you point out, with IPOs and M&As constrained, entrepreneurial people are creating new solutions.

Yeah, good discussion this week. Let’s do it again next week, Naren. Hope you have a great weekend.

Naren Ramaswamy:
Sounds good, likewise. Thanks a lot.

Mike Collins:
Excellent. Have a good one. Bye.

Naren Ramaswamy:
You too. Bye.

Ron Levin:
Hey, everyone. I want to take a quick break so I can tell you a bit about Alumni Ventures and our Seed Fund. AV offers smart, simple, and accessible venture portfolios for individual investors. We build diversified portfolios with low minimums, co-investing alongside established lead investors.

This strategy has mobilized over $1.3 billion from our community of more than 10,000 investors. With our Seed Fund, you’ll have the opportunity to invest in a portfolio that aims to back some of the most innovative and scalable early-stage tech ventures—companies addressing tough problems in large markets.

By building a fund of just pre-seed and seed-stage companies, we focus on the beginning of the venture funnel, where valuations are typically most reasonable and the potential upside is greatest. If you’re interested in learning more, click the link below or visit us at AV.VC.

Mike Collins:
Thanks for listening to this week’s show. If you like it, please subscribe and share it with friends. Have a great week and keep building.

Narrator:
Thanks again for tuning into The Tech Optimist. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d really appreciate it if you’d give us a rating on whichever podcast app you’re using, and remember to subscribe to keep up on the weekly episodes.

The Tech Optimist welcomes any questions, comments, or segment suggestions. Please email us at [email protected] with any of those, and be sure to visit our website at AV.VC. Thanks again. Until next time.

 

Speaker 2:
Welcome to the fourth episode of the Tech Optimist podcast. We have two portfolio company interviews for you today. One is working in the area of home medical testing. The other is trying to help families working through the settling of an estate.

Enjoy the show. We have three blocks for you today. In block one, we meet our portfolio company, Cy Fox. They’re innovating in the area of home medical testing—something we’re going to see a lot more of as we move into a more customized, remote, AI-driven healthcare system.

In block two, I talk to the founder of Alex, a company working in the area of estate execution. If any of you, like I have, have had to work through the settling of an estate, you know how time-consuming, disorganized, and expensive it is. It’s an area where innovation can really help, and Alex is trying to do it.

Finally, in block three, we end the show with a segment where I chat with a young VC in the business. We talk about things going on in their career and in the industry. Today, we’re talking a little bit about AI.

As a reminder, the Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized financial advice and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

Okay, let’s get into block one. Here’s the company Cy Fox. Michael, it’s nice to meet you. Cy Fox is an AV portfolio company. Why don’t you just introduce yourself and introduce your company and what you guys do?

Speaker 3:
Sure. So my background’s originally in chemistry, materials, biology—kind of that nexus—but for the past six or seven years now, I’ve been working in what’s called silicon photonics.

Silicon photonics uses semiconductor technology, but instead of controlling electrons, you’re controlling photons—working with light. This call we’re having actually is going through multiple photonic chips because there are fibers connecting data centers, and eventually you have to convert the light into electricity because computers use electrons. All of those conversions are being done on photonic chips, and that’s really what’s enabled the connectivity we have today—the way that the internet has scaled.

We use that technology to do blood testing. The reason that makes sense is that if you go into a central lab like Quest or LabCorp, and you open up the tools they’re using, they’re full of optics—lasers, lenses, detectors, and so on.

What we’re doing is basically miniaturizing all the optics that go into one type of blood testing tool called an immunoassay analyzer. We’re taking that tool and turning it into something that can be used in the home. That’s the main thrust of the company.

We’re already in the market with something that’s a little less innovative: a mail-in test. You put your blood on a small card that separates the cells from the serum, and that card is preserved in a desiccant bag and shipped to a central lab. There, we provide 17 different biomarkers from that one card.

We were able to put something on the market that’s dominant in terms of cost versus performance. You would need six test kits from our competitor to equal one of ours, meaning you’d have to prick your finger six times to get the same results.

That’s been really interesting. We’ve been doing that for about the last year and a half, and it’s grown a lot. We have thousands and thousands of people using it every month. We know of at least two lives that we’ve saved with things we’ve found—documented in Trustpilot reviews. We don’t know the full medical history of what happens after people take the test, but at least two have been confirmed.

The goal of the company is really to put a device in every home.

Speaker 2:
So this is more of an interim step—you generate some revenue, debug the technology. Walk me through the strategy of how you came up with this.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, the development cycles in medical devices are very long. If we weren’t in such a regulated space, we would’ve already launched the home device. Already, a year and a half ago, we could do demos at conferences where we’d prick someone’s finger and give them a result right away with the engineering units we had back then.

Speaker 2:
He’s holding up—for the listeners—something about the size of a shoebox, maybe?

Speaker 3:
A bit smaller. This is my phone here—it’s basically just a little larger than a phone, like a phone box. Already very low cost—a couple hundred dollars even in low volume.

The problem is that when you make a medical device, they often get stuck in their first version. Unlike most products where you just launch and see how customers like it, in medical devices you don’t get to iterate much. The first version has to be very strong.

So we decided not to compromise. We focused on developing the market with something that could be launched quickly. Mail-in testing can be launched quickly because it’s regulated differently. It’s regulated under something called CLIA, where you have a lab director acting like a miniature FDA. It’s totally different, and there are lots of nuances.

Speaker 2:
Super smart way to go. We’ve seen the opposite example with a company—I won’t name it—that launched a wearable that wasn’t really ready for prime time. It took a lot of money, got bad reviews, and as with software, it sucks when you first launch because you need time to iterate.

Speaker 3:
Exactly, and with software, you can iterate very quickly. This strategy has let us stay on a rapid innovation cycle while still providing value to people, refining the hardware and software.

Here’s what our V1 looked like—we’re now deep into building V2. It’s a chip with 15 different sensors that do immunoassays. In theory, you can do up to 15 proteins and hormones. It slots into the reader like this.

We could have commercialized this, but we decided to go the mail-in testing route instead. It’s been working very well. It’s a strategy that hasn’t really been used in medical devices yet.

The opposite happened to another company, Q Health. They launched a COVID test directly to the home, spent half a billion dollars scaling up manufacturing, and then later had to launch mail-in testing because adding more things to their at-home box was very difficult. They needed more products and went to mail-in testing afterwards.

But once you’re that large, innovation becomes hard. So that’s been our strategy. We’ll see how it works out—it’s pretty unconventional in the medical device field.

Speaker 2:
No, I think it’s smart though. It’s worth a shot. So where are you in just the fundraising side of this story and the scale of your business right now with people and the amount of money you’ve raised?

Speaker 3:
Yeah, I didn’t mention this at the beginning—probably an important detail. I’m the Chief Product Officer of the company, not the CEO. Early on, I was much more involved in fundraising, but now that we have a product in the market, that’s taking up a lot of my bandwidth. So I’ve been staying out of fundraising a bit more, and my co-founder Dietrich, who is the CEO, is leading that effort.

We went through Y Combinator in 2020, which was extremely helpful. I’d recommend it to anyone. Even though we were probably the first chip company they had—maybe there was one other—they really didn’t have much experience with semiconductor companies. But that didn’t matter; they were still extremely helpful.

We raised a couple of million dollars initially, and that triggered KLA to come in. KLA ended up leading the round, bringing us to about $6 million in our seed round. That got us to having fully baked engineering units, like the ones I showed earlier.

Then we raised additional funding—adding up to about $30 million—with Intel coming in, and they followed on again, as well as your fund, Alumni Ventures. So in total, we’ve raised about $30 million.

Speaker 2:
And that was in 2023?

Speaker 3:
The $20 million portion of that was closed in 2023—or maybe late 2019 for some of it.

Speaker 2:
Excellent. And give us more context—what do you view as the big trends and tailwinds to the work you guys are doing?

Speaker 3:
I think if you want to be successful in a hype cycle, you really want to be working five years in advance of it. For example, if you wanted to do AI successfully now, it would’ve been ideal to start five years ago.

In some ways, that’s the position we’re in. Home healthcare had a moment during COVID—that was more of a proof of concept. Telemedicine grew 40-fold during COVID, breaking assumptions about what was possible. But one of the main reasons it didn’t fully take off is that there’s just not good technology for it.

You need blood testing for 70% of medical decisions, and without that, it’s very difficult to practice telemedicine effectively.

Speaker 2:
Right, you go in for the blood work, then you do the appointment—it’s incredibly inefficient. If we all had one of these units at home, we could download instructions, do the testing, and eliminate maybe 50% of trips to the doctor or independent labs.

Speaker 3:
Exactly. I think a lot of us had that realization during COVID. Our thinking has been that within 10 years, this type of device will be in many homes, if not all. The company has been around about four and a half years, so we see ourselves halfway through that timeline.

Six out of ten Americans have a chronic disease, and there’s no easy way to “turn back the clock” to a state where people are just healthier. Some European countries manage better because they’re more walkable and have higher-quality food, but that’s hard to replicate here.

What we do know is that frequent blood testing and other interventions—many of which aren’t expensive—can help manage health better. A lot of this can be solved with software, and AI will make that even easier.

High-quality medicine is largely about information—checking in on patients and adjusting treatment plans. The one thing software can’t replace is collecting real biological data. Even with physical exams, you need blood results, sometimes scans.

I think we’re heading toward a future where information processing is automated, while cumbersome processes like blood collection are brought into the home. Healthcare is slow-moving, but at 20% of GDP, something has to change. We can’t go from spending 20% to 80% of GDP on healthcare. The trend has to be toward fixing this, and we hope to make a meaningful impact while capturing some of that value.

Speaker 2:
I also think that over the next 10 years, people are going to take more responsibility for their own healthcare. The current system is mostly reactive—wait until you’re sick or broken, then fix you.

But there’s a long-term trend toward preventative care. If people can manage their numbers—weight, cholesterol, ApoB, and other metrics—they can prevent costly, reactive care. The ROI is huge. Even with drugs like GLP-1s that help people lose weight, patients want to know how those drugs are affecting their cholesterol, ApoB, and other numbers. If they could get that data easily and frequently, they could stay healthier longer.

Speaker 3:
Exactly. One thing we’re doing is launching health programs on top of the blood testing we already offer. We’ve teamed up with an MD-PhD who was actually one of our customers—he used Cy Fox for a year to track his own blood results.

We recently launched a heart health program in beta, now with 5,000 people in it. The idea is: drugs have their place—statins, other lipid medications, maybe GLP-1s—but people don’t always want to stay on drugs for life if they don’t have to. Drugs can help you reach a healthier state, but ideally, you want to taper off.

This is measurable. For example, with statins, you want the minimum effective dose to reach healthy lipid levels—lipids can even be too low. You also want to avoid side effects, so dosage should be precise.

Speaker 2:
Right—the dose makes the poison. That goes back hundreds of years.

Speaker 3:
Exactly. Right now, dosages are done at a population level: “On average, we’ll throw this at you and see what happens in a year.” But if you can do frequent, low-cost measurements, you can personalize it.

That’s already what people paying $100K–$200K a year for concierge or precision medicine get. The question is, can we scale that for everyone?

It’s really two parts: automating the manual work physicians currently do so they can scale their expertise, and making measurements more frequent and low-cost so adjustments can be made continuously.

I think the future of many interventions will involve starting patients on drugs like GLP-1s or statins, but then helping them taper to the smallest effective dose—or even get off the drug entirely. We don’t know yet if it’s safe to take GLP-1s for 30 years straight. This combination of frequent testing and dosage optimization will be key.

Speaker 2:
Great. Any questions for our audience, Michael? How can they help?

Speaker 3:
If you’re interested in optimizing your longevity—specifically heart health, lipids, and metabolic markers like fasting insulin—you can try joining our beta heart health program.

Today, if you join, Phil—the MD-PhD working on this—will personally review your data for about an hour before you even get your results. While it’s not a doctor-patient relationship, it’s a rare chance to have a leading expert closely analyze your information and guide the early direction of the program.

Speaker 2:
Gets people looking.

Speaker 3:
Yes. So I think that’s a cool thing you can do if you’re curious about it. Or, for example, if you’ve never measured your ApoB and you want to get it measured and see where you’re at, that’s a great way to try it and also help us.

Speaker 2:
Can you do that at your website? If people go to your website, is there a sign-up for your beta?

Speaker 3:
Yeah, it’s partially hidden because when we send people to the site, we try to—

Speaker 2:
We’ll get it in the show notes.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, I’ll provide the link, but basically in the menu bar there’s a section called Blueprints and then Heart Health. So that’s one way. And then, of course, I think one thing is that the company is very careful about hiring. That’s a really big pillar of what we’re doing because it’s so interdisciplinary, and you need amazing people across a lot of different areas.

So I think just referring to great people to us—engineers who want to work on a transformational product like this, or business and product people who are passionate about doing something truly new in healthcare—that’s incredibly valuable. There aren’t many people like that who are not just thinking about it as good business but are genuinely interested on a personal level. We always try to find people like that for the product and business teams. Referring people like that to SFL so they can check it out, see if they’re interested, and maybe join us—that’s the most valuable thing given the audience of this podcast.

Speaker 2:
Excellent. Yeah, appreciate that. Final question: what’s your favorite personal productivity hack?

Speaker 3:
I used to do Chinese manufacturing at one point—building factories in China and another in America when I first started. When that company was acquired, here’s what I learned: if you book a flight to China two weeks in advance, the next two weeks become extremely productive.

So the hack is creating an artificial, highly imposing deadline where you literally have to leave. That makes everything move faster. I don’t have many day-to-day efficiency tricks, but that one tends to work.

Speaker 2:
Deadlines work. Deadlines absolutely work. We’re human beings—this is the software running our lives, and if you can mentally create a deadline, that’s a good hack.

I was talking to someone who’s literally moving just so they could clean out their junk. That’s another kind of forced constraint. Humans rise to the occasion time and time again when we put constraints on ourselves or others.

So Michael, it was really great to meet you and talk with you. Keep up the good work—super exciting company. Thanks for letting us be involved, and to our audience: help them out. Buy their products, send good people their way.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, thank you very much, Mike.

Speaker 2:
Have a good one. See you.

Speaker 4:
Hey everyone. I’d love to take a moment to tell you a bit about Alumni Ventures and our Foundation Fund. AV offers smart, simple, and accessible venture portfolios. We built our firm to serve the needs of individual investors, and we’ve raised over $1.3 billion from a community of more than 10,000 investors.

PitchBook ranked AV the most active VC in the United States in both 2022 and 2023, and CB Insights ranked AV a top 20 performing VC for 2024.

So where might investors start? Some people we talk to are interested in our Foundation Fund—one of our broadest and most diversified offerings. This fund taps into our substantial investment engine, offering investors a robust, diversified venture portfolio with deals sourced from many of our investing teams and with renowned lead investors.

The Foundation Fund portfolio is spread across stage, sector, geography, and lead investors to help ensure a diversified, balanced mix in your portfolio. For an investor new to Alumni Ventures, it could be a great place to start. Ready to learn more? Visit us at av.vc.

Speaker 2:
Now, segment two: our conversation with Alex. This entrepreneur and their company are tackling estate execution. Let’s learn more.

All right, Tech Optimist podcast—we’re talking to one of our portfolio companies today. Alexandria, why don’t you introduce yourself and your company?

Speaker 5:
Hey, thanks for having me. I’m Alexandra Meor, the co-founder and CEO of a company called Alex.

Speaker 2:
And what’s the business to do? What’s your elevator pitch, Alexandra?

Speaker 5:
At Alex, we’re the first and only automated wealth transfer solution. We’ve created a platform to simplify the estate settlement process.

Speaker 2:
So let’s talk about that pain point. Estate planning is something people should do but often don’t. Demographically, I assume we’re looking at a huge wave of boomers entering that part of their journey. You’re trying to make it simpler and cheaper, right?

Speaker 5:
Yes. Only one-third of people in this country who could do estate settlement actually do it.

When I landed on this space—I’ll explain in a moment—I initially thought, “I want everyone to do estate planning.” But the reality is that number isn’t going to change much. People have a hard time planning and making difficult decisions.

So I wanted to help families when the moment came—when someone you love passes away. We decided to focus on estate settlement.

Unfortunately, it came from personal experience. A very dear family friend of ours passed away. I was close with her children and offered to help. I’m not an attorney, and I had never settled an estate before.

This family friend was a stay-at-home mother. Her husband served our country and worked as an elevator technician. Simple, good people. They’d lived in the same house since the 1980s.

We uncovered a will—it was a paper map that took us on a digital scavenger hunt. The process of settling Carol’s estate took me 900 hours and 18 months, which is actually the average amount of time it takes families in the U.S. to settle an estate.

That’s a full-time job no American is trained for. You don’t know what you’re in for until you’re in it.

Speaker 2:
So this is focused more on the estate settlement side than the planning side?

Speaker 5:
That’s right—settlement.

Speaker 2:
Got it. So they’re in it, they have the need, and it’s usually 900 hours and a year or more. How is Alex going to help with that? And what stage are you in?

Speaker 5:
We raised our seed financing about a year ago. Initialized led the round, and of course American Family, Alumni Ventures, and the Green D team—which I know is where you started—are also on our cap table.

We’re in a good place now with paying customers. We’ve successfully settled estates, we’re busy building out our distribution channels, and we’ve developed automations that are making a real difference.

Going back to estate settlement for a moment: many people don’t fully understand what it is because you don’t think about it until you’re forced to.

One of the first and most important steps is figuring out what’s actually in the estate. Most people know the net worth of Elon Musk or Bill Gates better than they know their own parents’ assets.

Speaker 5:
That was a surprising finding for us. At Alex, we help anyone with a trust, a will, or nothing at all—which, by the way, is the majority of Americans. Folks who might have a trust or will often find it’s outdated. It’s just a paper map that doesn’t do the heavy lifting—it doesn’t wait on hold with banks for you, doesn’t return your Comcast cable box, doesn’t notify credit bureaus, and doesn’t handle all the administrative work.

In fact, when I was doing the work for Carol, I did what many people would do: I called an attorney and paid them about $30,000. After two months, I asked what they were doing. The attorney said, “What do you want me to do?” I replied, “Wait on the phone with Bank of America so we can get Carol’s bank account.” He said, “So you want me to wait on the phone for five hours and charge the family $650 an hour?”

That was a huge insight: the unit economics don’t work for these point solutions and advisors to handle the administrative work. So at Alex, we’re automating all of that. But this is also the most human moment anyone will ever go through in their life. It’s not insignificant.

For us, we use a “mind and machine” philosophy: you’ll always have a human in the loop, and we’re empowering that human—making them like a superhero—by automating tasks and using AI.

Speaker 2:
So high tech, high touch. Today, what’s the mix, and what do you eventually see it being? How much is human support for people during this tough time versus automation, AI, and software that can reduce friction? Where are you now, and where do you want to go?

Speaker 5:
That’s a great question. Let me answer it this way: when my co-founder, Hugh Tamia, and I first started, we imagined a magical button you press and—poof—the estate is transferred.

But we found early on, when we actually started serving families (and I say families, not customers, because we end up serving entire families), they want a human in the loop. Not for the entire 12-to-18-month journey, but at the first point of contact. They need to know someone is on their side.

So we have a care team with highly trained, empathetic people—CPAs, trust administrators, lawyers, and more. Now that we’ve been settling estates for a while, we’ve been automating the processes we know take the longest.

Take Chapter One of estate settlement: discovery. Most people don’t know what they don’t know. As I like to say: how can we transfer what we don’t even know exists? This is crucial. For nearly every family we’ve served—actually, I think every one—we’ve found hidden assets.

Families want peace of mind and certainty during a time when they have neither. We’ve automated discovery across countless online systems.

Next is form-filling. Financial institutions, government agencies—you name it—they all ask for the same information but in slightly different formats. Misspell one name or address and you can set the process back months. Automation ensures everything is efficient and accurate.

Another important aspect is distributions to executors and heirs. People think, “Dad made me executor,” but don’t realize it’s a legal fiduciary responsibility. Distributions often arrive in parts—not in one “party hat” moment when everything shows up.

And here’s a shocking stat: one out of three people who receive an inheritance in this country have a negative balance within just two years. That’s a massive issue.

This is part of the $84 trillion Great Wealth Transfer moving from boomers and the Silent Generation to Gen X and millennials.

Speaker 2:
It’s mind-boggling how big that is. People don’t talk enough about it. Boomers, of which I’m right on the edge, have done an enormously good job of accumulating wealth. But when they pass on, it’s going to the next generation. It’s an enormous amount of wealth.

Speaker 5:
Exactly. When people talk about the Great Wealth Transfer, wealth planners focus on the windfall you’ll receive. But how are you going to get it? Nobody talks about that.

We’re the only solution making that process streamlined and holistic. Ask an attorney, CPA, or your neighbor how to settle an estate, and you’ll get wildly different answers.

At Alex, we widen the aperture. We handle everything that comes after you lose someone you love. We don’t just do a sliver—we do all of it.

Think about taxes: we all agree you don’t need a CPA to do your taxes anymore because TurboTax exists. You can still see a professional if needed, but you have an option.

We look at estate settlement the same way. You can think of Alex as the TurboTax of estate settlement.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, so the next big milestone is raising your A round. What are the three things that you think Alex needs to accomplish before you’re ready to go out and raise that first institutional round?

Speaker 5:
I think we’ve had some really good headwinds. We’ve had some really good luck. We have a really good team. We’ve seen some great signals. I think we’re continuing to focus on creating a great experience for our customers. We already get heartfelt messages from customers where we’ve been able to settle their estates. We’re busy working on more automations and helping as many families as we can. To be honest, it’s really more of everything we’re already doing.

Speaker 2:
Our community is large and helpful. What’s your question?

Speaker 5:
Here’s the thing—truth be told, you don’t know that you’re going to need this until the moment comes. You really don’t. And when you’re in that moment, it’s a heightened state of emotion. Oftentimes, we turn to our family and friends. So if you have a friend or family member, or if you personally are going through this, please refer them to Alex. It’s incredible how much people wish they had more time to just be with their family and grieve. But all these administrative things are such a headache and such a burden on the entire family.

Speaker 2:
Alright, so last question. How about a personal productivity hack? What one thing do you do that you’ve found really works for you?

Speaker 5:
I have to say, being a parent has taught me a lot about being ruthlessly focused and prioritizing, which is an extremely great gift and definitely a productivity hack. The other thing that goes along with that is time blocking. There’s something to be said about having these 90-minute chunks where you focus on one thing. You can do the same with meetings—I like to do outward-facing meetings in one block of time and inward-facing meetings in another block. It really helps reduce context switching, which can be incredibly helpful.

Speaker 2:
I’ve observed that mom CEOs are very efficient and disciplined with their time—getting things done and having to be super productive because you just don’t have the ability to waste time. It’s something we can all learn from.

Speaker 5:
Yeah, exactly. It’s also interesting—there’s this show called Lessons in Chemistry. I don’t know if anyone in the audience has watched it, but there’s this scene where the main character is a new mother. She goes to her neighbor’s house exhausted, having not slept with a newborn only a few weeks old. Her maternal neighbor says, “This is what mothering is. You think you can’t, but you do it anyway. You think you can’t, but you find a way.” Honestly, that is the best lesson for being a startup founder or CEO. You think you can’t, but you find a way.

Speaker 2:
I mean, that’s the common denominator of successful CEOs: the ability to stick with it, grit, finding a way. We wish you and Alex the best in your journey, and thanks for spending a few minutes with us today, Alexandra.

Speaker 6:
Thank you so much.

Speaker 2:
Nice to meet you.

Speaker 6:
Let’s stay in touch. Take care.

Speaker 7:
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Speaker 2:
And here is segment three in my conversation with a young VC. This week Noreen and I talked about the future of AI.

Speaker 6:
Mike, great to see you again this week. I’d love to pick your brain on what’s on your mind. Maybe we’ll start with AI. It’s always important to touch on AI and its developments. The last few weeks we’ve talked about current events and news, but today I’d love to take a bird’s-eye view of this AI revolution. There’s a lot of gloom in the press about AI taking away jobs and what that means for the future. What do you think it means for our kids and the jobs of the future?

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely thought-provoking to think about. I think the conventional wisdom has been related to engineering and STEM. There’s always been this split in my world between people who view college as a means to a job—you develop knowledge and skills to become an accountant, engineer, doctor, lawyer—and those who see it differently. I grew up in that era. I went to a liberal arts school, Dartmouth College, and majored in engineering sciences while surrounded by a liberal arts environment. I’ve always believed in the power of liberal arts.

But I grew up when people would ask, “Where are you going to school?” and essentially mean, “What are you going to be? What job will define you?” That mindset has gotten even stronger recently. Many say college is a waste, you don’t learn practical skills, you end up with debt, and only certain careers matter—engineering, medicine, sciences. If you go to Harvard and major in religion, people scoff.

I’ve always believed that you go to college for many reasons—becoming an adult, gaining independence, experimenting with who you want to be. But the most important things to acquire are the ability to communicate and the ability to learn. When I went to school, there was no internet, no smartphones, and the companies that now dominate the world either didn’t exist or were tiny. Beyond networking, friends, and credentials, it’s shortsighted to think education should only lead to a job.

I think this is even truer with AI. We should be humble about predicting which professions will even exist over the next 40 years. You shouldn’t study medicine just because it’s a safe way to make money—do it because you love helping people. Many areas of medicine are just giant databases, and a lot of that decision-making could change dramatically in 10 or 20 years.

My advice is to learn to communicate, learn how to learn, and learn to interact with human beings. Study great paradigms of the world—scientific methods, philosophical thought—things that train your brain in flexible, malleable ways.

I know I ran there. Noreen, what do you think?

Speaker 6:
I definitely agree with you. I think we’re at an inflection point in thinking about what humans can do that AI cannot. Humans can feel, empathize, and perform critical thinking—skills that liberal arts teach us. I think liberal arts majors will become even more important as AI doctors and software engineers surpass humans because they can process vast datasets and keep up with research in ways humans simply can’t while treating patients.

What AI can’t automate is sitting bedside with a patient, improving their morale—which sometimes yields better outcomes. Communication, critical thinking, and empathy will be in demand.

Also, I’m more optimistic than the press about AI taking away jobs. That’s shortsighted. If you look back 120 years, three-quarters of the world were farm laborers, and half the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, poverty is below 10%, and only one in 20 people are farm laborers. Jobs evolved, and quality of life improved. I think AI will similarly evolve jobs and, eventually, raise humanity’s overall standard of living.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, this time is probably not different. Every major technology since the beginning of civilization has, in the short term, been disruptive—but in the long term, it’s led to growth, new jobs, and higher living standards.

Every 13-year-old in America today objectively lives better than kings and queens of centuries past. I doubt that the suite of technologies we have now—including AI—will change that trajectory.

As a venture capitalist for 40 years, I’ve often heard “this time it’s different”—both for business fundamentals and new technologies. The truth is that yes, technology disrupts jobs, reduces some types of work, but history shows it creates opportunities we can’t even imagine.

Hopefully, AI moves more of humanity up Maslow’s hierarchy—getting rid of dangerous, backbreaking, and tedious jobs, both blue- and white-collar. The real question is what humans will always do better.

I think humans will always have better relationships with other humans. Like you said about bedside manner, people want to be around, relate to, joke with, empathize with, and support other people.

At Alumni Ventures, when we design customer service and account management, we focus on automating repetitive tasks to free up time for our people to spend more time with customers in personal, human ways. Developing those human skills is essential—they’re here to stay.

Speaker 6:
Absolutely. That’s actually a good segue. You touched on venture and how that job will evolve. I’d love to bring us to the present—and maybe a little bit into the recent past—and talk about recent vintage venture funds. A lot of them have been trying to raise capital in the current macro environment but have been falling short of their targets. In the last 12 years, the number of VC firms has tripled, and this is an existential threat for those firms because they may not have a differentiated access point for deals, which is why they’re falling short.

As the asset class deployed a lot of dollars in 2021 at peak valuations, many of those companies are now crammed down, and that’s the only feedback you have if you go out to raise. I’m curious what you think about the future of VC, and how secondaries potentially play into that?

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think there are a couple of things to unpack there, Noreen. One is that firms formed between 2020 and 2023 are in trouble. If those are their first vintages, they’re facing a double whammy: they probably deployed capital during an overpriced period, and their LPs are now over-allocated into the asset class. That’s going to make it very difficult for those new funds.

I think there will be a “cleaning of the house,” and only the best will survive—and thrive. It’s actually a good time, a buyer’s market for talent in VC right now.

The second point is the market for secondaries. To clarify for our audience: secondaries involve investors buying stock from early investors or employees of private companies. There’s been a trend of fewer companies going public; many companies don’t want to be public because of the costs, the short-term pressure from public markets, and generally the challenges of being a public company when you want to think long term.

At the same time, there’s been a lot of available private capital, so companies haven’t needed to go public except to provide liquidity. Capitalism loves opportunity, so I think we’re on a long-term trend toward making the secondary market more efficient, providing liquidity to investors and employees, and allowing companies to stay private longer.

Today, it’s not very efficient—only a handful of companies have access, and sellers usually face a big discount. Large pools of capital have started forming over the last year to do this, but we’re still in the early days. Over the next five to ten years, I think the secondary market will become much more efficient. That’s good for the entrepreneurial economy.

We’ll see how it develops. Do you have any thoughts, Noreen?

Speaker 6:
Absolutely. I agree that we’re in a bit of a blip right now. Secondary markets haven’t burgeoned into something big yet, and IPOs and M&A exits are limited. But as secondaries play a bigger role and become another liquidity path—for founders, which incentivizes them to start more companies, and for VC firms to continue backing founders—it will be extremely important for the U.S. innovation economy and globally.

The existence of IPOs and M&A paths historically incentivized people to start and invest in companies. Secondary markets becoming another viable avenue will be critical for innovation. I’m bullish on that. For example, Lexington Partners raised their largest-ever secondary-focused fund at $28 billion, and several other secondary-focused VC funds have emerged to buy stakes from other VCs.

We’re still in the early innings, and it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.

Speaker 2:
One of the ways this might play out is by moving away from what I call the “Big Bang exit.” Traditionally, you form a company, work hard, and then there’s a big event—a sale or an IPO—where everyone cashes out. It’s viewed as the finish line.

I think a much healthier approach would be for companies, as they mature, to allow founders and early investors to take small, reasonable chips off the table along the way. For example, a founder could sell 5% of their stake during a Series B round to achieve some liquidity—a release valve that relieves pressure without forcing an early exit.

That would be better for building sustainable, long-term businesses and solving hard technical problems that take many years.

When I started in VC, we used to say we wanted founders living out of their cars and eating ramen for ten years because it kept them hungry. That was a lousy perspective. The reality is founders are motivated by much more than money, and having no resources or living far from the office is counterproductive.

So, if we can encourage a healthier ecosystem where founders and employees have more waypoints along the journey—and there are willing buyers at fair prices—I think that’s a positive evolution. We’re starting to see the market adapt now that IPO and M&A paths are more constrained. Entrepreneurial people are creating new solutions.

Good discussion this week. Let’s do it again next week. Hope you have a great weekend, Noreen.

Speaker 6:
Sounds good, likewise. Thanks a lot.

Speaker 2:
Excellent. Have a good one. Bye.

Speaker 6:
You too. Bye.

Speaker 8:
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Speaker 2:
Thanks for listening to this week’s show. If you liked it, please subscribe and share it with friends. Have a great week and keep building.

Speaker 1:
Thanks again for tuning into The Tech Optimist. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d really appreciate it if you’d give us a rating on whichever podcast app you’re using, and remember to subscribe to keep up with the weekly episodes.

The Tech Optimist welcomes any questions, comments, or segment suggestions, so please email us at [email protected] with any of those. And be sure to visit our website at av.vc. Thanks again. Until next time.